writing – Shady Characters

Shady Characters advent calendar 2023: Chinese counting rods

December 3, 2023

Welcome to the first ever Shady Characters advent calendar! I’m counting down to Christmas by way of a collection of beautiful, clever, important, and/or outright odd calculators and calculating devices. Some come from the pages of Empire of the Sum, some are part of my Calculator of the Day series, and some will be new to the blog. I won’t manage twenty-four posts, but I do hope to hit at least one every other day. I hope you enjoy the series!

Shady Characters advent calendar 2023: the tally stick

December 1, 2023

Welcome to the first ever Shady Characters advent calendar! This is all a little experimental, but I plan to count down to Christmas by way of a collection of beautiful, clever, important, and/or outright odd calculators and calculating devices. Some come from the pages of Empire of the Sum, some are part of my Calculator of the Day series, and some will be new to the blog. I won’t manage twenty-four posts, but I do hope to hit at least one every other day. I hope you enjoy the series!

Shady Characters at the WSJ: Five Best Books on Great Inventions

October 4, 2023

The following was published in the Wall Street Journal on August 18th, 2023, under the title “Five Best: Books on Great Inventions”. It comprises short reviews of five books I read in the course of researching Empire of the Sum. Enjoy, and please leave your own recommendations for good books on inventions, computing, and calculators in the comments!

Miscellany № 99: minting the dollar

March 11, 2023

I was in St Andrews a couple of weeks ago with my wife Leigh to celebrate our tenth wedding anniversary. St Andrews is a picturesque, if slightly exposed town on the north coast of Fife, in Scotland, and is famous mostly for two things: the Old Course, being the oldest golf course in the world; and its university, which is the oldest in Scotland and the third oldest in the English speaking world.

Miscellany № 98: a novelistic conundrum

January 13, 2023

On Mastodon (or rather, on fediscience.org, a server powered by Mastodon), Marc Schulder asks:

What do you call the list of teaser phrases at chapter beginnings in novels like “Three Men in a Boat” or “Going Postal”?

So far I’ve found “epigraph”, which is not specific enough, and “taster”, which possibly is not what book people would call it.

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